Freedom from Frustration

The Five Storeys of Aspiration

Ok, here’s why “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” is an all-time favourite melody.

We identify with the yearning and dreaming of Dorothy’s naive young heart and fear for her only finding out through bitter experience. We know that she can’t get where she’s going and even if she gets there it will all have been a charade.

The nation’s favourite song, like an addictive substance, is an accessible substitute for worthy ambition. It is a trick played upon our passive potential that has our heartstrings tangled before we know it and leaves us painfully strung up in an escapologist’s nightmare debacle.

Last time I spoke about the elevator in “Are You Being Served?” Let’s take a ride in the elevator of aspiration and check out each increment toward really being sure of yourself in all that you put your hand to do!

Step into the first and Ground Zero level of aspiration for change/healing/transformation/success (insert your relevant goal)

Dorothy’s is the very lowest form of aspiration, called WISHFUL THINKING that all too easily decays into the unpalatable aftertaste of REGRET.

I knew I had to write about this today, thanks to my sister’s share of this ironic proverb on her facebook timeline! She prompted the thought that I have changed. I have learned to value “setting intentions” rather than “having expectations”

So are we meant to just “suck it up” then?

Well naturally no. Children experiment and learn and grow. We remark upon and celebrate their inquisitiveness and simple quest for certainty. However, too commonly aspiration becomes something easily squashed and compacted until it remains only as a tantalising mind-screwing carrot dangling inside our head, gently banging against the wall of our skull just often enough to remind us that we are not where we wanted to be by this point in our life

Wishful thinking is fairly unlikely to be a creative or fruitful activity. Let’s see if we can aspire to something more than wishful thinking.

Cultivate Great EXPECTATION?

It’s good isn’t it, to have and to cultivate Great expectation? It sounds like progress to talk about cultivating expectation.

Wise sage King Solomon put it like this “without a vision the people perish”

Yet there is a shadow side to this. Weather one or two setbacks (inevitably so) and all too often dashed expectations feed a growing lament “Why, Oh Why Can’t I?” Certainly as an inspirational and instructional practise we might call this “writing a vision”. However much though, we hold fast to and run with this flag of vision, however large we write those letters on our imaginative banner, without some detail and strategy, vision-casting is little more than spell-binding.

Knowing what we want and seeing it clearly without having a clue how to get there intact is a terrible curse

Surely HOPE is the key?

If there is vision and expectation, then hope can be expected to rise! I love this commodity like I love John Maxwell for saying that failure is not fatal, or that “Sometimes You Win, Sometimes You Learn”. As a fervent trier I was shocked and yet liberated when I grasped something psychologist Henry Cloud urged his readers. To accept a certain “good hopelessness” is not being maudlin. It is exposing the hype about superficial positivity that doesn’t get to the core of the issue of what sabotages an authentic endeavour.

Like prayer for endurance in an abusive marriage.

Owning the passion and the vision and having a carefully designed and executed plan is promising.

Paul Scanlon once put it like this “Without a plan the vision perishes”

However, there’s another variable that needs accounting for. Following a vision, the passion AND the plan YET repeatedly failing to see it work its alchemy is sheer masochism.

I put it like this “Without inner conviction, neither plan nor vision prospers”

FAITH is the next level

It’s a quest and yet it’s a gift. When you have it you know you’ve got it. Key thing is, don’t stake your life on hope, ensure that beyond wishes, expectations and hopes you have obtained this assurance of what you hope for. It is the gold you pan for in the stream of possibilities and opportunities. Conviction that you know for what and how and when to move!

It is an exhilarating feeling. Why some spend their lives in search of it and others seem to be raised on it I can’t explain but it is the crucial line to cross between strife and favour.

ACTION

That final mental and spiritual shift of belief was the cue you needed to take action.

You’re away, and the marvellous thing is that you now know you can do it! It’s the first action that actually counts! No one could call me lazy. However, it was never enough to get in my aspiration “elevator” and act out by punching the buttons to the floor I wanted to visit. Until I had the capacity that would equip me at each level of the building, I was unconvinced, unprepared and I could never capitalise on the opportunities opened to me.

So where are you? It’s a cliché to say “I’m going to the next level” and yet I believe there is a logical sequence evidenced in the people we know, the stories we’ve heard and setbacks experienced. After rounds and rounds of bungled “snakes and ladders” I am confident I can assure a smarter way up. And it’s an inside job!

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